Healthcare: AI that saves lives

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The contours of AI’s future imprint on health and life sciences are visible today. Technologies that use AI, such as the advanced analytics tools that help medical practitioners in hospitals to diagnose cancer and other diseases, have already made a distinct mark in the sector. Automated online tools help diagnose individuals’ minor medical complaints before they visit the doctor’s office. Algorithms crunch data from wearable devices that alert patients (and their doctors) to potential health issues.

AI becomes medical mainstream

AI’s power to understand disease patterns and diagnose illnesses, and to suggest preventive and curative measures, will continue to grow. But its use in health and life sciences is expanding beyond these applications. Thanks to continuous innovation by health-tech start-ups and established players, AI will make its appearance in operating theatres, and will provide clinical science labs with tools of unprecedented power to identify the root causes of disease. In the next five to seven years, AI will come to the aid of medical professionals in these and other ways, saving lives in the process.

This also represents significant growth opportunity for organisations in the health sector. According to research firm Global Market Insights, the US AI market in healthcare is expected to exceed US$4 billion in 2024, growing at a compound annual rate of 38% from its 2016 level of about $320 million. Europe’s market size is projected to grow at a similar rate during the same period to reach around $3.8 billion. The firm believes global AI market healthcare will surpass $10 billion by 2024.

Take for example automation. Robots will be a common sight in operating theatres of the future. The use of AI-driven robots to augment the role of human surgeons will become widespread in US hospitals over the next five years, according to Brian Kalis, the managing director of digital health and innovation at Accenture, a consulting company. His firm estimates that the use of such robots will generate $40 billion of value annually for the US healthcare industry by 2026. “Reducing complications and errors that can occur during unaided human surgery will lead to shorter hospital stays,” says Mr Kalis. “This will contribute much of that projected value.”

AI-assisted nursing tools will also boost efficiency, generating $20 billion in value for US hospitals over the same period, according to Accenture. Another consultancy, McKinsey, estimates that using such tools to perform routine nursing functions will eventually boost nurses’ productivity by between 30% and 50%. China’s healthcare sector is also likely to see brisk growth in adoption of AI-assisted technologies in these areas. According to new research from Forrester, 20% of large health industry organisations in China intend to adopt smart nursing technologies, and 17% will adopt medical robots, in the next 3 years.

“We are just at the beginning of a big journey so I think we are simply scratching the surface of the potential and the implications of artificial intelligence," says Filippo Lanzi, Region Head, GSK Consumer Healthcare Asia Pacific. "I see a huge benefit in the future in terms of leveraging artificial intelligence to provide value to our customers."

Benefits for patients and doctors

Advances in diagnostics will be partly driven by the growth of AI-based image recognition technologies in screening for diseases. The use of AI techniques can reveal much more detail from MRI and other scans than human clinicians can possibly identify, and can sift through extremely large complementary data sets to aid diagnosis. One application will be cervical cancer screening. Researchers at Lehigh University in the US state of Pennsylvania, for example, have recently developed an AI-based screening technique that, in addition to offering greater screening accuracy and efficiency, can be used at relatively low cost in developing countries, where incidence of the disease is highest. Global Market Insights predicts that the medical imaging and diagnosis segment of the global AI healthcare market will grow by an average 40% each year between now and 2024.

Genome sequencing will also advance thanks to AI. The ability of medical science labs to better understand the genetic causes of diseases, and to design therapies to treat them, will eventually result in much more effective prevention strategies and care approaches. Technology companies such as Google are bringing AI techniques to bear that analyse ever larger sets of sequence data but with greater levels of precision. Other medical technology firms, for example China’s MGI Tech, are developing genetic sequencers that promise to significantly reduce the cost of sequencing to medical institutions. As a result, gene sequencing is likely to take a major leap forward in the next few years, with beneficial effects for doctors and patients alike.

Remote control

The impact of AI will be felt in both developed and developing countries, especially where primary care physicians are in increasingly short supply, notes Mr Kalis. “How do we create new primary care delivery models where machines and humans work together to save labour and produce better patient outcomes?” he asks. Health-tech innovators that are using AI to deliver automated medical advice may soon have an answer. In the UK, Babylon Health and Your.MD are digital health assistants that perform triage and diagnosis of patient illnesses based on data input into an app. Both work with the National Health Service in different ways but both companies say their apps are helping make GPs’ lives easier by handling simpler cases and giving the GPs time to focus on more complex ones. Rather than a job destroyer, in many areas of healthcare such as this AI is augmenting existing roles and freeing up experts to be more efficient and effective.

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